Public Narrative
Christina Krause
July 24, 2013
How do we create change at scale?
Strategy
Narrative
what?
why?
Shared understanding leads to
Action
Source: Helen Bevan, 2010
Source: Marshall Ganz
Not all emotions are equal …
• Some motivate and some inhibit actions
• When framing, you want to overcome the inhibitor emotions (action
inhibitors)
Values to Action
Inertia
Urgency
Apathy
Anger
Fear
Hope
Self-doubt
Isolation
You can make
a difference
Solidarity
Source: Helen Bevan, 2011
Leadership Practices: Building Relationships
• Leaders learn to form interpersonal relationships that link individuals,
networks and organizations
• Relationships create an opportunity for interests to grow, change and
develop “social capital”
– A relational capacity that can facilitate collaborative action
• Relationships amongst peers are as significant as those among leaders
and between leaders and members
• Build a network and relationships and create leaders at all levels
– Challenge:
• Cast net widely enough to recruit others to do this work
• Create the capacity to train them
• Offer coaching to support their development
Leadership Practices: Telling the Story
• Why respond to a challenge and take action?
1. How?
• Analytics – how to use resources efficiently, compare
costs, etc
2. Why?
• Why it matters?
• Why care?
• Why value one goal over another?
**To answer why – we use narrative – not why we think we
ought to act, but rather why we do act
Power of Storytelling
• Communicate our values through emotion
• Stories share what we feel – our hopes, cares,
obligations
• It often takes much more than knowing to inspire
action
Source: Samantha Bailey, Based Upon the Work of Marshall Ganz
Public Narrative
You will learn to tell a story about:
• yourself revealing why you care about the issue
you want to change
• the organisation or community who you are
influencing
• the action required to create change and why it is
urgent.
The key to motivation is understanding that
values inspire action through emotion
values
emotion
action
Source: Marshall Ganz
Source: Samantha Bailey, Based Upon the Work of Marshall Ganz
who I am – my values,
my experience, why I
do what I do
Story of Self
who we are – our shared
values, our shared
experience, and why we
do what we do
Story of Now
Source: Samantha Bailey, Based Upon the Work of Marshall Ganz
transforms the present
into a moment of
challenge, hope, and
choice
Story of Us
What is your Public Narrative?
1. Story of Self: Why were you called to what you have been called
to as a leader, the purpose in which you will ask others to join
you?
2. Story of Us: To what values, experiences or aspirations do you
hope to appeal to others when you ask them to join you in
action?
3. Story of Now: What urgent challenges to these values does your
team or community face now? What outcomes could you
achieve by acting together, beginning now?
Source: Marshall Ganz
Telling Your Narrative
“A good Narrative is drawn from the series of choice
points that have structured the “plot” of your life –
the challenges you faced; choices you made and
outcomes you experienced”
Source: Marshall Ganz
What is your Public Narrative?
Story of Self: Why were you called to what you have been called
to as a leader, the purpose in which you will ask others to join
you?
-
Our identity
Choices that have made us who we are
Values that shaped those choices
Share “choice points” = moments when we faced a challenge,
experienced an outcome and learning
- Adapt our story of self in response to feedback
- WHERE WE CAME FROM; WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO;
WHERE WE THINK WE”RE GOING
Source: Marshall Ganz
What is your Public Narrative?
Story of Us: To what values, experiences or aspirations do you hope
to appeal to others when you ask them to join you in action?
– Our stories of self overlap with our stories of us
– Expresses values and experiences shared by the us we are
evoking at the time
– Articulates values of our community
– creates collective identify
Source: Marshall Ganz
What is your Public Narrative?
Story of Now: What urgent challenges to these values does your
team or community face now? What outcomes could you
achieve by acting together, beginning now?
• Story and strategy overlap because a key element in hope is
strategy
– A credible vision of how to get from here to there
• Have to create a meaningful choice
– NOT  “We must all choose to be better people”
– Eliciting commitment to an action
• Can be small or large
Source: Marshall Ganz
CHALLENGE – CHOICE – OUTCOME
What turns recounting an event into a story?
• A plot begins with an unexpected challenge
that confronts a character with an urgent need
to pay attention, to make a choice, a choice for
which you were unprepared.
• The choice yields an outcome – and the
outcome teaches a moral.
Step 1: Focus on CHOICE points
In our own story we reveal those moments in our lives
when we experienced the influence of our values on the
choices we subsequently made, which have shaped who
we have become.
•
•
•
•
•
When did you first care about being heard?
When did you first experience injustice?
When did you feel you had to act?
Why did you feel you could act?
What were the circumstances – the place, the colours,
the sounds?
• Why did you choose to work in the public sector?
• Why do you stay?
Challenge, choice, outcome in your own story
Once you identify a specific choice point – perhaps your first
true experience of challenge or your choice to do something
about it – think hard.
Challenge
• Why did you feel it was a challenge?
• What was so challenging about it?
Choice
• Why did you make the choice you did?
• Where did you get the courage (or not)?
• Where did you get the hope (or not)?
• Did your parents‘ or grandparents‘ life stories teach you in
any way how to act in that moment?
• How did it feel?
Outcome
• How did the outcome feel?
• Why did it feel that way?
• What did it teach you?
• What do you want to teach us?
• How do you want us to feel?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGqp8lz36c
1. What values does each of those choices
convey?
2. What details or images caught your attention
and also reflected those values?
3. When did she shift from a story about herself to
a story of why now?
4. How was her story about herself relevant to her
story of why now‘?
Tips for Brainstorming your Story of Self:
• Determine the challenge, the choice, the outcome you
want to focus on for this story.
• Add specific details. How did it feel, what did it look like,
what did it sound like, what did it smell like? What still
moves you? The more detail you provide, the more the
audience will be able to connect with you.
• Consider - who would you be telling this story to? What
about it would move them?
• Keep it short – story of self should take no longer than two
minutes.
Source: Samantha Bailey, Based Upon the Work of Marshall Ganz
Exercise – Story of Self
1. First think about your purpose in asking others to join
you.
– What action are you going to ask them to do?
2. Now start to reflect on your own motivations for wanting
to address this challenge.
– Why is it important to you, so what values move you to
act?
– How might these values inspire others to similar action?
3. Now think hard. Where do these motivations and values
come from? What public stories can I tell from my own life
about specific people or events that would show (rather than
tell) how I learned or acted on those values?
Source: Helen Bevan, 2011